Supermicro SYS-5017A-EF Intel Atom Centerton 1U Server

The Supermicro 5017A-EF is going to be a server that you hear a lot about over the next few months. Its predecessors, based on the Intel Atom D510 and D525 were extremely popular platforms for low power appliances such as low end dedicated web servers, pfsense appliances, proxy server and low power NAS applications. The new Supermicro 5017A-EF uses the Intel Centerton SoC, specifically the Intel Atom S1260 and promises to lower power consumption. Let’s take a look at what makes up the Supermicro 5017A-EF.

Test Configuration

Supermicro originally sent this test unit with a 1TB Western Digital RE4 drive and 2GB of memory. To make a generation-on-generation comparison, we outfit the test system with 8GB of RAM and a SSD. We did grab a few numbers with the 1TB WD RE4 also as this is a typical configuration.

The Supermicro SYS-5017A-EF

The front of the Supermicro SYS-5017A-EF is rather unassuming. There is ample ventailation and standard power/ reset buttons and LEDs.

Supermicro 5017A-EF Front

Inside the Supermicro 5017A-EF is a X9SBAA-F motherboard. With the Intel Atom S1260 Centerton SoC, the mITX motherboard is still packed with components.

Supermicro 5017A-EF Interior

Another new feature with the Supermicro X9SBAA-F is a single SODIMM slot. Since this is an Intel Atom S1260 Centerton SoC, it supports an ECC SODIMM. Supermicro provided a 2GB Micron unit however we added a 8GB Kingston Low power ECC SODIMM to maintain parity with our 8GB Intel Atom D525 version. Here we see three benefits: ECC, a single SODIMM and lower power SODIMMs. The last two add another dimension of lower power versus just the Intel Atom S1260 Centerton SoC.

Supermicro X9SBAA-F Kingston 8GB ECC SODIMM

Supermicro decided to use a Marvell 88SE9230 6.0gbps SATA III controller capable of supporting the four SATA ports onboard. While some may be wondering why an ICH9R was not used like last generation, here is an interesting fact: The ICH9R has a 4.3w TDP while the Marvell 88SE9230 consumes ~1w. Another interesting point is that that controller supports Marvell HyperDuo which is an automated SSD + HD storage tiering solution. More on this in a future piece.

Supermicro X9SBAA-F Marvell Controller

The Supermicro 5017A-EF has one feature that is significantly ahead of its predecessor, it includes a new Intel i350-AM2 dual port network controller (2.8w TDP). This change has more ECC than the previous generation’s dual Intel 82574L controllers (0.727w TDP each) and new features like on-chip QoS.

Supermicro X9SBAA-F Intel i350-AM2

Another major improvement is that the Supermicro 5017A-EF now has a dedicated IPMI port. This allows one to have the Supermicro 5017A-EF management port on a separate physical network.

Supermicro 5017A-EF Rear

Expansion is handled via a legacy PCI slot. With the riser, the chassis supports a full height PCI card. Our sense is that this slot will go largely unused at this point. On the other hand an Intel Pro/1000 GT does add another gigabit port to the mix if needed.

Supermicro 5017A-EF PCI Riser

In terms of storage, the Supermicro 5017A-EF has spots for dual 3.5” storage and our review sample came with a 1TB WD RE4 drive. Drives are secured by their bottom mounting points. Likewise, there are mounting points for 2.5” drives including SSDs.

Supermicro 5017A-EF Power Supply

The power supply for the unit is a 200w 80+ Gold unit. The PSU can easily power the Intel Atom S1260 as well as a PCI expansion card and two 7,200rpm 3.5” drives. The Gold rating is a major new feature as it will increase efficiency over previous versions. Here are the power consumption figures. Let’s say they are so good, the measurements were taken multiple times.

Power consumption of the unit is awesome. For our power testing we use an Extech 380803 True RMS power analyzer. The Extech is a really nice unit that even records usage over time.With the original Western Digital RE4 1TB drive, we saw some significantly higher power spikes during the spin-up of the 7,200rpm 3.5” drive. In fact, the drive spin up takes more power than the SSD based system at 100% CPU load.

Supermicro SYS-5017-EF Power Consumption

With the SSD, we had awesome power consumption characteristics. Since the SYS_5017A-EF has a dedicated IPMI port, the experience is similar to other Supermicro servers that use the American Megatrends MegaRAC management solution.

Supermicro 5017A-EF BIOS

We highly recommend Supermicro “F” servers that indicate onboard IPMI as this does make management much easier.

Conclusion

Overall, the Supermicro 5017A-EF appears to be a winner in the segment. Power consumption is awesome! We are going to deep dive into the included Supermicro X9SBAA-F, the Intel Atom S1260 Centerton SoC and setting up appliances with this system in the near future. Overall, the new Supermicro/ Intel platform is a substantial improvement over the previous generation Intel Atom D525 part. At $474 MSRP for a single unit, and given the power consumption profile of the server, this is certainly something that is well suited to a network appliance, low cost and low power file sharing appliance or simple web/ mail server.

Patrick has been running ServeTheHome since 2009 and covers a wide variety of home and small business IT topics. For his day job, Patrick is a management consultant focused in the technology industry and has worked with numerous large hardware and storage vendors in the Silicon Valley. The goal of STH is simply to help users find some information about basic server building blocks. If you have any helpful information please feel free to post on the forums.

That is definitely a great point, not having access to PCI-e sas/sata controllers is going to put a limitation on using these in a NAS situation. Perhaps supermicro will have a different mobo config with a couple PCI-e slots.

The 5017A-EP is pretty different if you look at the specs. Different SATA, uses dual 82574L’s, only a 1.86GHz Atom, no IPMI, and has a different GPU with HDMI output options. I think that one is more HTPC oriented whereas the 5017A-EF is for a server appliance.

I’m using the same board with a 80W PicoPSU in an even smaller case (MC500 from Logic Supply) with one SSD system disk and 2 2.5″ 1TB WD REDs for data and 8GB ECC RAM…
As for the noise – I NTC-throttled the included 50mm case fan (below 2000rpm@idle; around 2700rpm@max heat) – only audible when close up.
This setup uses about 15W-17W under normal conditions (family home server: mail, file, proxy, multi media on SMP Debian, CPU governor set to “ondemand”).
During the initial configuration phase (stability and thermal hardening) I ran mprime in torture mode and it did not surpass the 22W mark (simple wattmeter on the on the 230V socket, all disks powered up).
My goal was a SoHo solution running 24/7 at below 20W – this one nailed it 😉

What kind of CPU temperatures can one expect on this board (X9SBAA-F)?
I’ve just bought it myself. From BIOS I can see that the temperature in my system quickly climb to 80 deg Celsius (after cold boot). This does not seem normal to me.

Is anyone using Windows Server 2012 on this? For some reason I’m getting high CPU usage by SYSTEM process when copying/moving files. I’m interested if anyone is experiencing this. I’m also interested what drivers you use. Feel free to email me at tomuxaz [AT] gmail [DOT] com;

Rodney – here’s a quick trick – install it on another machine, then transfer the dive if you have that issue. I have seen that happen on Xeon E3 and E5 platforms as well as AMD platforms since the Windows 2012 release.

I have 2 Supermicro s1260 servers. 1 of them has been fine all along with W2008R2SP1. I tried W2012 on the 2nd unit. After 30 or so days, I just can’t make it stable, it keeps on rebooting. My dealer replaced the whole unitt witth the same results. So I downgraded to win2008r2sp1 and i guess it’s happy now.

Same for me! Both Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 crash a lot showing IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I installed a program named WhoCrashed and it reports that it is very unlikely a hardware error and that it is most likely a driver issue.
It seems that Supermicro needs to test a Windows Server 2012 (R2) configuration immediately, because you can’t expect buyers to use an old OS like Windows Server 2008 R2 or older while Windows Server 2012 is released more than a year ago.
I sent an email to support@supermicro.com about this problem. I hope it helps!

I returned the board and got a new one. I installed Windows Server 2012 R2 (Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2 are both supported).
After a few hours it crashed again. So the other board wasn’t broken! I installed Linux on it (Centos 6.5) and it is stable for more than 10 days now.
Conclusion: Don’t use it for Windows Server 2012 (R2), even if SuperMicro supports it!

I now have one of these (added the same 8GB DIMM as in the review). It runs Proxmox and FreeNAS (using virtio drivers in KVM), a local Linux instance, etc. Performance is totally adequate, but Atom-like. IPMI works great.

The power supply fan does not seem to do much to cool the CPU, and my stock PSU sounded like a dying hard disk within a week. I replaced it with a fanless 120W Flex-ATX PSU which was 5mm wider than the stock PSU and it fit well enough. There’s less than 1mm of space between the side of the new PSU and the ITX board instead of ~5mm, but at least I can see light between them so there is a gap.

Can get CPU temp up to 95C using Linux “stress” utility, which sometimes trips the IPMI sensors from green to amber (starts at 95C), but system maxes out at 94/95C and does not get hotter. Has been stable running at this temperature for extended periods. Usual temperature is 80-85C (with Speedstep enabled and ~20% CPU usage). Saw exactly the same temperatures with both PSUs. At these temperatures case the case does not feel hot to the touch, so I am done messing with it.